The famous 65ft Eisenhower Tree has been lost to recent ice storms leaving
Augusta officials in mourning and a new look at the 17th fairway

Augusta National is gripped by an acute case of arboreal angst. The Eisenhower Tree, and let us pause here in reminiscence of the majestic loblolly pine that once dominated the 17th fairway, is no more.

William Porter Payne, the club’s chairman, was a maudlin study in grief on Wednesday as he lamented the loss of “our famous and beloved tree” as a consequence of irreparable damage in recent southern storms. “It represented one of our membership’s most important links to President Eisenhower,” he said, gravely. “We don’t know what, if anything, we will do.”

More than the lone cypress punctuating California’s glorious ‘17-Mile Drive’, more even than General Sherman, the giant sequoia at the heart of the Sierra Nevada, the Eisenhower Tree was to the green jackets far more than simply a tree. It was an emblem, an enduring icon of an institution almost obsessively wedded to notions of permanence and tradition.

For those belonging to a club that names each of its holes after indigenous varieties of tree – Tea Olive, Pink Dogwood, Flowering Crab Apple – its demise due to extreme weather was as traumatic as having an incisor removed.

Dutifully, Augusta’s patrons have joined in the vicarious outpouring of sorrow, flocking en masse to the 17th to take photographs of, well, not much except a newly pristine patch of grass.

Arnold Palmer, at 84 almost as old as the now ex-tree, has been on especially sentimental form. He knew when it was but a mere sapling, and recalls President Eisenhower’s rant when one of his tee-shots struck its gigantic limbs once too often.

“I can tell you a lot of stories about Ike and what he thought of that tree,” Palmer said. “He’d say, ‘Arnie, they tell me you have some influence around here’.”

The tree remains conspicuous by its absence. At its peak of vitality it stood 65ft, while its expanse left just a 20-yard gap between the longest limb and the second cut of right-hand rough. For it suddenly not to be there is a kind of grotesque affront to the exacting, not-a-hair-out-of-place ethos that prevails at this place.

Accordingly, then, Augusta is in mourning, couching references to the poor expired tree in the pained nostalgia that the average person might reserve for the passing of an aged Labrador.

For those with the most extreme cases of the tree blues, there is even a commemorative coin, emblazoned with an image of its former luxuriant beauty and yours at a snip for £100. And for anybody asking who of sane disposition could possibly want such a thing, rookie Patrick Reed has already bought one. Sometimes, to inhabit this manicured Arcadia is to succumb to a type of madness.

This tree, for all its delightful aesthetics was, in the bald and brutal final analysis, still just a tree. It had earned its place among the most magnificent of loblollies and yet it risks, posthumously, delusions of grandeur. There will, one day, be another tree.

The state of Georgia has, as anybody who travelled here down Interstate 20 would attest, rather a lot of them.

But Augusta’s cherished symbols can exert a considerable hold on the popular imagination. For it did not take long for tree-induced grieving to go global. When Edinburgh’s Dalmeny Golf Club – home of the world’s only other Eisenhower Tree, planted by the president personally on a visit in 1946 – heard the sad news, they sent Augusta the present of an acorn. It could not, on its own, palliate the members’ anguish, but it has at least helped in the healing process.

Quite a folklore has sprung up around a single tree, which might explain why Jack Nicklaus argued that it would be “sorely missed”.

Tommy Aaron, the 1973 Masters champion, had one memorable encounter with it when his ball deposited itself in its upper reaches, to cue an eruption of pollen. His caddie informed him that no ball ever stayed lodged in the tree and, true enough, when he was passing the following day a Pinnacle dropped, with the same marking he had used. When Aaron relayed the story to Nicklaus, the six-time winner replied: “I’m not sure I believe it.”

The tree also put rather a hex upon Tiger Woods, who, while crouching beneath its branches to craft an escape shot during the 2011 tournament, succeeded only in catching his foot in the pine straw. The ensuing injuries to his left knee and Achilles tendon kept him out for the majority of the season.

Woods is yet, apparently, to offer his heartfelt condolences for the tree’s untimely end.